Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted last year on 18 counts of rape and sexual assault against black women while an officer of the Oklahoma City police department.
Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP

When former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was on trial last year for the rapes and assaults of 13 different black women, a clear-cut picture emerged of not only a predator who exploited the uniform, but of detectives who worked decisively to stop him.

But in a challenge to the official narrative, seven of Holtzclaw’s accusers have filed a lawsuit saying they could prove the opposite: a sweeping failure of Oklahoma City and its police department to act on signs that there was a predator in their ranks.

The suit was filed a little over a week ago and in recent days added two plaintiffs for a total of seven. This is the third lawsuit to counter Oklahoma City’s story of how police captured Holtzclaw, and by far the most expansive, as it launches a damning set of new claims.

In the most pivotal new allegation, the lawsuit claims police covered up a complaint of sexual assault made on or around 11 May 2014, 38 days before Holtzclaw was suspended. That a complaint was made as early as 11 May 2014 has not been alleged before this lawsuit. The claim is based on the recollection of one of Holtzclaw’s accusers, and it conflicts with a police incident report that lists a different date, two weeks later.

Holtzclaw became a national symbol of police barbarity last year after a jury convicted him on 18 counts of rape and sexual assault – crimes he committed exclusively against black women while he was an officer of the Oklahoma City police department. In court and police documents, Holtzclaw is identified as white or Asian or Pacific Islander.

Holtzclaw’s crimes took place over seven months in 2013 and 2014 while he worked the 4pm to 2am patrol. And the official narrative portrays Oklahoma City detectives as acting swiftly and deliberately as soon as he was named as a potential sex offender. The department suspended him from duty on 18 June 2014, just hours after daycare worker Jannie Ligons reported that he forced her to perform oral sex.(Ligons has allowed the press to identify her by name and spoken publicly about her assault.)

And the latest lawsuit is sure to reinvigorate questions about when police investigators had enough information to suspect Holtzclaw of sexual assault.

For one, it claims that police only took Ligons’s 18 June report seriously because she had a “familial relationship” with the Oklahoma City police.

The lawsuit also repeats the explosive claims that a woman accused Holtzclaw of sexual assault on 5 November 2013 – eight months before he was suspended from the force – and that the sex crimes unit actually began investigating Holtzclaw on 8 May 2014, seven weeks before he committed his final assault. The timing, first laid out in Ligons’s lawsuit, would mean Holtzclaw attacked half the women he has been convicted of assaulting while he was under investigation for sexual assault.

The complaint also alleges that while he committed his crimes, Holtzclaw was being sued for using excessive force against a black man, Clifton Darnell Armstrong, that resulted in Armstrong’s death, an event which should have triggered his suspension or greater scrutiny. (The city maintains that Armstrong died from methamphetamine use; Armstrong’s family later dismissed the lawsuit.)

And the suit makes the new claim that another victim, TM, reported her assault on 11 May 2014, six and a half weeks before Holtzclaw’s suspension. The city has always stated that TM’s report came in on 24 May 2014, and was lacking sufficient detail to be connected back to Holtzclaw.

The lawsuit seeks damages of more than $75,000 for each plaintiff, punitive damages, and a court order for Oklahoma City police to receive sexual assault training, improve their sexual assault investigations and wear body cameras.

It was filed on behalf of Holtzclaw’s accusers, including Ligons, by Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights lawyer who promised a series of lawsuits to illuminate the police department’s missteps in December.

“We need to find out how aggressive [investigators] were,” he told press the day after Holtzclaw’s conviction. “We need to find out: how could this happen so many times and nobody see what was going on? … It’s mind-boggling how nobody would catch this.”

Unfinished business

The civil lawsuit is the next chapter in a case that has already come to symbolize the marginalization of black women and the ability of predatory officers to target them.

Holtzclaw, police investigators found, methodically targeted black women with criminal records or a history of drug use or sex work. For all but one of his targets, police investigators said, the former officer used his position on the force to run background checks for outstanding warrants or other means by which to coerce sex.

Holtzclaw’s choice of victims laid the groundwork for an aggressive defense. His attorney, Scott Adams, aggressively questioned his accusers about their marijuana use, drinking, thefts and suspended driver’s licenses in an attempt to undermine their credibility.

In December, Crump and local activists supporting the victims said that a civil lawsuit would bring accountability to a police department that overlooked his victims and bring justice to the five women whose accusations did not result in convictions.

“We are not totally satisfied,” said the father of one of those women in December. “I don’t understand how this officer could operate for months [with] it going unnoticed by somebody above him.”

His daughter, Shandegreon Hill, spoke publicly on Monday after the filing of the lawsuit.

“I have always felt in my heart that I was not the first victim, and now there’s proof that there was someone before me,” Hill said. “And there’s no telling how many in between.”

Competing timelines

The newest lawsuit claims that Holtzclaw actually had a 14th victim, one who undermined the official narrative offered by investigators.

The claim comes from an ongoing civil lawsuit filed by an Oklahoma woman in July 2015 that accuses Holtzclaw of physically and sexually assaulting her, and the city of failing to properly monitor him. The alleged assault occurred on 5 November 2013, about two months before the first attack in the prosecutor’s timeline on 20 December 2013.

DC– whom the Guardian is identifying by her initials because she has not released her name to the press – claims that she was entering a restaurant on 5 November 2013 when Holtzclaw grabbed her, slammed her face into a brick wall and pressed his erection into her backside. He then handcuffed her and drove her around the city before releasing her. The new lawsuit adds that DC was so terrified that Holtzclaw would rape her that she urinated on herself as a way of deterring him.

After the alleged attack, her suit claims, DC was treated for injuries at Oklahoma University medical center, and a nurse there called the police so she could make a report.

DC’s claims are crucial to this newest lawsuit because in her report she identified Holtzclaw by name. The women who filed suit in recent weeks claim that Holtzclaw’s alleged violence against DC should have prompted Oklahoma City police to pull him off the streets. Instead, the suit claims, the reporting officer never followed up with DC, and police failed to take appropriate action against Holtzclaw.

With DC’s permission through her attorney, Cynthia D’Antonio, the Guardian reviewed her medical records from the day of her alleged assault. They corroborate her description of the physical attack: “Patient reports that an OKC police officer wrongly detained her, cuffed her, and pushed her face into a concrete wall. She states that he then roughly placed her in the back of her car. The patient complains of severe pain. The patient sustained a blow to the head.”

Under “clinical impressions”, the records read: “Physical assault. Contusions to the head and face, right shoulder and right wrist.”

But in court filings, Oklahoma City has dismissed the possibility that Holtzclaw assaulted DC sexually. Attorneys for the city say that Holtzclaw mistook her for the suspect in a car theft and detained her. “However, despite being interviewed by a police officer” at the hospital, the city said in a recent filing, and filing a use-of-force complaint against Holtzclaw, “it was not until she filed a lawsuit that she made any claim that this assault was ‘sexual’ in nature.” The medical records do not indicate a sexual assault, either, although DC does not claim that the assault injured her.

A spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City police department, Ashley Peters, said police investigated DC’s use-of-force complaint, but the results were confidential. She added that DC’s complaint had nothing to do with Holtzclaw’s sexual assaults. “An internal investigation was done,” Peters said. “It was done correctly. Everything that needed to be done was done. It’s not like we’re protecting [Holtzclaw.]”

The latest lawsuit further claims that police began to investigate Holtzclaw on 8 May 2014 – not on 18 June, as officials have long claimed. The allegation is drawn from the affidavit for Holtzclaw’s arrest warrant filed in August 2014, once the sex crimes unit had completed its investigation. The affidavit, obtained by the Guardian, reads: “On 5-8-14 an investigation began in the Sex Crimes Unit in reference to the above named defendant, an Oklahoma City Police Officer, sexually assaulting different women.”

The lawsuit also features a new claim that the victim known as TM actually made her report as early as 11 May 2014 to Detective Rocky Gregory, a sex crimes investigator who is named in the lawsuit. Police have always maintained that TM did not report her assault to authorities until 24 May.

TM reported that a police officer forced her to expose herself and perform oral sex.

“However,” the lawsuit claims, “despite [TM’s] documented May 11, 2014 complaint, Defendants covered up Holtzclaw’s attack on [TM] and did not investigate, check or review the numerous systems and evidence available to them, including but not limited to Holtzclaw’s GPS, computer access, or contact logs. Further, Defendants did not even question Holtzclaw regarding [TM’s] complaint.” Gregory would become one of two detectives who led the investigation into Holtzclaw.

The lawsuit does not detail the evidence that TM made her claim as early as 11 May 2014. An incident report released to the Guardian by the Oklahoma City police department indicates that officer Jonathan Thomas took TM’s report on 24 May 2014.

Oklahoma City has denied that it began investigating on 8 May. Attorneys for the city acknowledge that of all the women to testify against Holtzclaw, TM was the first to come forward to police.

But the city, in legal filings responding to Ligons’s lawsuit, says TM’s report did not give investigators enough information to identify Holtzclaw. TM was not able to identify her attacker by name. TM also acknowledged in a preliminary hearing that she initially misreported the location of her assault to police.

Later, police determined that the alleged assault had occurred on 8 May. That’s why the date of 8 May appears in the affidavit, Rich Smith, an attorney for the city, said. The affidavit itself offers no details of what would have prompted police to start investigating Holtzclaw on that day.

Smith added another detail: he said TM didn’t correctly identify the date on which a police officer had allegedly assaulted her. Instead, when she spoke to police officers on 24 May, she recalled that the assaulted happened just days earlier, Smith told the Guardian, instead of weeks earlier.

The combination of a wrong address and a wrong date, Smith said, made it impossible for the sex crimes detective to verify which officer might have been involved. When the sex crimes unit ran TM’s name through Varuna,a system that records any contact with civilians that had been documented by Oklahoma City police officers, Smith said TM’s name came up several times, and not on any date TM had given.

Damario Solomon-Simmons, a Tulsa attorney who is assisting with the women’s lawsuit, said that TM continues to insist that she reported the assault just days after it occurred. But rather than assume that she is wrong, Solomon-Simmons indicated, the women’s legal team has made this the basis of their claim that she could have reported the assault as early as 11 May.

The city has not claimed that TM gave detectives the wrong date in any of its recent legal filings.

The lawsuit filed Monday claims that TM told police that Holtzclaw ran her name for warrants – a detail supported by the transcript of Holtzclaw’s first police interrogation. Holtzclaw’s use of a police database to look up warrants was later shown to be his method for choosing victims.

TM is one of the seven women suing Holtzclaw and Oklahoma City in this latest lawsuit. In December, Holtzclaw was acquitted of the charges connected to TM and several other women represented in this lawsuit. But the bar is not as high in civil court for those women to prove injury and win damages.